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John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky, review: why Lennon’s message of peace, love and people power remains potent today

Yoko Ono and John Lennon - AP
Yoko Ono and John Lennon - AP

The spirit of revolution was alive and well in John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky (Channel 4), a documentary celebrating John Lennon’s peace, love and occasionally anger-laden album Imagine and, in particular, the much-admired title track.

This wasn’t so much the untold story of the making of a classic album as a fascinating addendum to an iconic story which had already been told in the companion film released by Lennon, Yoko Ono and director Steve Gebhardt in 1972, and fleshed out even more in Andrew Solt’s tribute Gimme Some Truth.

Here director Michael Epstein took the story further. He had access to Lennon and Ono’s personal archive and, for obsessives, unearthed previously unseen film footage of recording sessions, interview material, and early run-throughs of Imagine, Jealous Guy and How? But what this film really did was provide context. Not only in the words and memories of people who contributed musically to the album – drummers Jim Keltner and Alan White, bassist Klaus Voormann among others – but also friends, hangers-on, assistants, photographers and journalists who captured a precise moment in the personal and creative lives of Lennon and Ono.

Despite being only eight at the time, Julian Lennon was particularly good on the bubble that existed at Tittenhurst Park, the Surrey mansion where the album was recorded. Also captured, by Voormann and others, was the extent to which Lennon Snr felt trapped by the overwhelming fame of the Beatles, and how his emotional attachment to Ono was linked to that – throwing fresh light, in turn, on his radical change in musical direction following the band’s break-up a year earlier.

More than anything, though, this film sought to give Ono the equal credit many (including Lennon in a 1980 interview replayed here) said she should have had for her contribution to Imagine’s title track. As a result, what emerged from what might otherwise have been just a gentle retrospective was a remarkably rounded picture of two emotionally fused and radically engaged talents working together to condense their thoughts on art, politics, love and music into one of the best-known and commercially successful protest songs ever.

In so doing, it also reminded us of how and why Lennon’s – and Ono’s – central message of peace, love and people-power remains so potent to this day.